UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

The attention to customers requires a closed-loop process in which every function worries about delivering a good experience, and senior management ensures that the offering keeps all those parochial conceptions in balance and thus linked to the bottom line. The article is about how to create such a process, composed of three kinds of customer monitoring: past patterns, present patterns, and potential patterns. (These patterns can also be referred to by the frequency with which they are measured: persistent, periodic, and pulsed.) By understanding the different purposes and different owners of these three techniques--and how they work together (not contentiously)–a company can turn pipe dreams of customer focus into a real business system.

What Customer Experience Is

Customer experience is the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company.

Obtaining the Right Information

There are three patterns of customer experience information, each with its own pace and level of data collection.

When companies monitor transactions occurring in large numbers and completed by individual customers, they are looking at past patterns.

Present patterns are collected through surveys or face-to-face interviews, studies tailored to the subject, or some combination thereof. It helps to prepare customers for the inquiry by telling them the purpose of the survey, how they will hear about the findings, and what role they might play in addressing them.

Potential patterns are uncovered by probing for opportunities, which often emerge from interpretation of customer data as well as observation of customer behavior.

Customer experience does not improve until it becomes a top priority and a company's work processes, systems, and structure change to reflect that.

Once persuaded of the importance of experience, every function has a role to play.

Marketing has to capture the tastes and standards of every one of its targeted market segments, circulate that knowledge within the company, and then tailor all consumer communications accordingly.

Service operations must ensure that processes, skills, and practices are attuned to every touch point. (Present-patterns surveys are good for tracking high-volume touch points such as call centers. )

Product development should do more than specify needed features. It should also design experiences after observing how customers use products and services, learning why they use offerings as they do, and figuring out how existing products might be frustrating them. Ideally, product developers will identify customer behavior that runs counter to a company's expectations and uncover needs that haven't been identified.

Information technology that can collect, analyze, and distribute CEM data, integrate the information with that generated by CRM, and monitor progress must be in place. As the data flow stabilizes, the form of presentation and its degree of detail should be keyed to whichever internal audience the data are meant for. A level of detail that is appropriate for an analyst, for example, can easily overwhelm a line manager. CEM is a play within a play, so to speak; just as customers must have a good experience, employees need to have a good experience digesting information about themselves.

Human resources should put together a communications and training strategy that conveys the economic rationale for CEM and paints a picture of how it will alter work and decision-making processes. Since the front line determines the bulk of customer experience, it would be a good idea to study those employees' individual capabilities, work processes, and attitudes. As for performance management, of course customer experience results should affect compensation. But as we have learned in recent years, incentives that are too powerful are more likely to distort behavior than channel it productively.

Account teams must progress from annual surveys to detailed touch-point analysis, then translate present patterns of customer experience and issues gleaned from recent transactions into action plans that are shared with customers. Not every significant implication is readily apparent. Leaders need to press the data to precipitate customers' concealed longings.

Customer dissatisfaction is widespread and, because of customers' empowerment, increasingly dangerous. Although companies know a lot about customers' buying habits, incomes, and other characteristics used to classify them, they know little about the thoughts, emotions, and states of mind that customers' interactions with products, services, and brands induce. Yet unless companies know about these subjective experiences and the role every function plays in shaping them, customer satisfaction is more a slogan than an attainable goal.

Source: Harvard Business Review; Feb2007, Vol. 85 Issue 2

Orkun Öztürk
107604075